Ukrainians are taking bold steps to preserve their country’s sovereignty. ShareAmerica’s Defending Ukraine series draws attention to exceptional people in Ukraine who exemplify this courage.
Yana Zinkevich was a high school student when Russia illegally invaded parts of Ukraine, including the Donbass region. It was in 2014. She then planned to become a doctor. And faced with the Russian attack, she wanted to help her country.
After her studies, Yana Zinkevich joined the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps in the Donbass. She was in charge of dispensing medical aid. Few doctors then practiced in conflict zones.
“There was no one to treat the wounded *, she explains in an interview with the magazine The New Yorker. I understood that I had to do something. This is how she founded Les Hospitaliers, a voluntary paramedical organization whose slogan is “in the name of every life”.
The idea of the name “Hospitalers” began to germinate in her mind when a priest told her the story of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, one day when she had taken refuge with other people in the shelter of bombings in the Donbass.
“The shelling was constant,” she recalls. She said to herself that if she came out of this ordeal alive, she would create a medical unit that she would call “Les Hospitaliers”.
Initially, the unit was small, consisting of only a handful of volunteers and a vehicle. But it has grown steadily over the past nine years. On a typical day, the team treats between 10 and 12 people, both soldiers and civilians.
Yana Zinkevich led more than 200 evacuations, until her car accident in 2015. She is now paralyzed from the waist down, but that doesn’t stop her from continuing to train volunteers in the medical care of the injured .
In 2022, the BBC included her in its list of the 100 most influential women of the year*. Today, Ms. Zinkevich is a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament and has received her country’s Order of Merit.
The members of the Hospitallers come to the aid of their compatriots often at the risk of their lives. At 49, Tatiana Vasilchenko is a retired accountant who began training with the Hospitallers in 2021. She traveled to Mariupol on February 23, 2022, the day before Russia’s massive invasion of the country. Taken prisoner, she remained captive at the Azovstal steelworks for five months, then was finally released. Ms Vasilchenko is among the Ukrainians who President Volodymyr Zelensky honored at a ceremony in December 2022.
Anastasia Fomitchova, she is a volunteer from Kyiv, who was living in France when she decided to follow a training with the Hospitallers, in 2017. She was then 23 years old. “I felt like I wasn’t doing enough,” she told the New Yorker.
It began by distributing rations to Ukrainian troops in the Donbass. Today, she continues her studies, but returns to Ukraine during school holidays.
*in English
